I broke one of my own rules, “Don’t talk about Christmas until after Thanksgiving.” Well, I did more than that and chaos ensued. Thanksgiving is about two-ish (a little less, actually) weeks away and I just carried all the Christmas decorations up from the basement! I schlepped box after box up the stairs. Speaking of boxes, I must have opened Pandora’s box. It’s been a dizzying frenzy of Christmas talk since I started. Mainly by Nancy, of course! She wants to be sure that I know who she wants to buy things for, but she is also excitedly wondering if I am about to get her stuff out, too. I had to tell her, “Nope, sorry my back hurts, now!” We’ll do it later at a leisurely pace. She was cool with that, but I still can’t get her to chill about buying presents for people. Totally my fault. Karen said to me, “You know that you have no moral high-ground to stand on, now.” Ha, so true! My rule was more of a guideline, anyway.
So, most of the time Nancy talks about things, i.e. the Holidays, well before the time she should be talking about them. Uhm, so today doesn’t count. Anyway, I give her rules and guidelines about when she can talk about these things, but she “forgets” and talks about them anyway, so I must give her lots of reminders along the way. Finally, the day comes to enjoy the exciting activity or celebration, but she is dazed and completely quiet. “Aren’t you excited?” I might ask. She nods, and her eyes widen, but that’s all the reaction I’ll get, for now. Hours later or most likely the next day she won’t be able to contain her excitement. She will chatter non-stop about how much fun she had. This always happens. She gets fixated on it and looks forward to it so much, but she doesn’t know how to respond when that time finally comes.
If there is too much stimuli like loud noises or lots of activity she may shut down, but then again, she may not. She may get overly excited, instead. There isn’t any in-between. When she is excited, she stims which is self-stimulatory behavior. Side note, I saw her stimming while I was carrying up boxes. She puts both hands in front of her, palms facing, and begins shaking and swinging them. She also squeals a little. She does this repeatedly. It’s kind of like she is doing the robot.
She also stares intensely. It usually makes people uncomfortable. She’s not trying to be rude. She’s just processing. She has problems processing. She came into the room a minute ago. She stood there and stared at me from the corner of the hallway. “What is it?” I asked, but she couldn’t answer right away. “Oh yeah I remembered. I want to buy a present for…” I don’t remember who. She gave me quite the list. When it’s closer, we’ll set dates and make lists. I’ve already told her multiple times not to worry about it. I told her to think of something else and to go put her headphones on. It’s a tad frustrating, but this one’s on me. And honestly, I don’t mind her talking about Christmas or whatever holiday. The problem is nature of her statements and questions. She is intense. She is frantic. She repeats them over and over and over and over and….
After I carried up the boxes of decorations, I folded the clean laundry. I gave her freshly washed socks to her and told her to put them in her bucket. So, when giving her instructions I must break it down into small manageable tasks or she will get frustrated, and then so will I. She gets things turned around in her head. When she repeats instructions back to me, most likely, they will be backwards. This also happens when she tries to write site words (For example, she tries making a list on her own.) or even when trying to tell a fun story. That’s usually why she asks me to ‘splain it to people. She gets lost easily, too. There’s been multiple times when we left a doctor’s office and she’ll turn down a wrong hallway. I’ll ask, “Where’re you going?” She’ll repeat me, “Where am I going, duh!?” Then, she giggles to herself kind of flustered.
Nancy giggles and talks to herself. She just jabbers away. She hears herself whispering and she thinks someone else is talking. She’ll say, “That person is talking to me again!” I tell her to turn up her headphones and this fixes the problem. Along the same line, here’s part of an old blog entry from way back in 2007, “Then, she discovered she lost her bag of pens. In her mind, someone has come in and stolen them. The reality is that she has misplaced them somewhere. This is one of her biggest fears. There are imaginary evil villains, but very real to her, who sneak into our house and mess with her stuff and never mind the nice things in the house like the computer or television. These people are only after her pens, pictures, or stuffed animals, only the things precious to her. Mom found her pens. They were in her purse. Nancy carries this purse everywhere. It is jammed packed full of her most important possessions. It would probably look like junk to most people. She loses everything in this disorganized mish-mash of stuff.” Incidentally, this happened again today. Only she was emptying her trash can and she loudly exclaimed from her room, “I found my pen! I had thrown in in my trash.”
Anyhow, remember the pandemonium that I started? All the while, Nancy had been excitedly chatting away about Christmas gifts. She started pulling things out of her room, “Here, put this with the boxes!” Moments later, she was waiting for me at the top of the stairs, “Here this too.” My living room and kitchen looked like little elves had thrown handfuls of sparkly paper, baubles, and strands of lights all over the place. The culprits, however, are my two cats and big ol’ goldendoodle.
They knocked over the boxes as quickly as I could carry them up. The dog, Charlie, bullied her way through the boxes which caused a domino effect with several of them. The little kitty, Myrtle, started pulling out tissue paper and newspapers. The stuff that had been wrapped up in these papers are now strewn around the jumbled mess. One of the boxes containing the small tree fell over in slow motion. It landed on the youngest cat, Xander. He just laid there like a cartoon cat that had been splatted. It was hilarious! (Don’t worry he wasn’t hurt.) Finally, he wriggled out from under the box. I snatched him up, hugged him, and checked for injuries. He wanted me to let go of him and immediately started playing, again. He jumped from box to box like the floor was lava. As I was straightening up Nancy hollered from her room. I bet you can guess what our conversation was about. *hint-They are usually wrapped in pretty paper and with glittery bows.
How’s your day going? Do you have any “guidelines” that get bent from time to time?